Yamuna Zake: Health Pioneer

October 9, 2012

Yamuna Zake is a master teacher and healer who has literally dedicated her life to understanding how the body works and helping others to create positive change in their bodies through what she has learned.

She helps people heal from injuries, improve their posture, and align their body through her hands on work and through a series of courses available on DVD.

An Introduction to Yamuna® Body Rolling

The Early Years

At 11 years old, Yamuna Zake told her parents she was going to do something very important in helping to improve the world. At the time she thought it was going to be working with children to help improve mainstream education.

By the time she was 15, she was deeply involved in the practice of Hatha Yoga. She continued a very serious yoga practice all through high school and during her university studies. Even though she was majoring in education, she was always looking at how yoga postures, breathing and balancing postures could greatly improve children’s focus and concentration skills in the classroom.

While working on her Masters degree in education, she helped open and run one of the first Hatha Yoga centers in New York City, called Serenity Yoga.

Turning a Negative into a Positive

During the birth of her child, Yamuna sustained an injury and lost stability in her left leg. She had no idea that one injury would change her life – and career – forever. Yamuna was frustrated in her inability to get help from any doctors or professionals so she began to figure out her recovery on her own.

It was through stabilizing her own hip and leg through her Hatha Yoga practice that she began to explore with her Yoga students their individual restrictions that held them back from doing certain yoga postures. Her Yoga students began to send their friends with more serious structural problems such as sciatica, herniated discs and joint problems. Very quickly, Yamuna moved away from yoga postures and began working with her hands.

A New Career Begins

Through this work, Yamuna developed a therapeutic hands-on treatment called Yamuna® Body Logic. She built a worldwide reputation for being able to heal injuries when no one else could. After treating thousands of people, she realized she had to develop a system that could make her practice and theories available to everyone. Yamuna wanted to create a system where people could self-heal and self-maintain their own bodies. She took a ball and thought it could act like her hands if she bore weight into it and moved on it in the same way she works with her hands.

The Birth of a New Work and Worldwide Business

Yamuna began by giving herself a session in the same anatomically correct way that she works on other people. The results convinced her that she had to get this work out into the world. As she began to get articles written about the new work (that she named Yamuna® Body Rolling), she began teaching workshops around the U.S.

The first challenge Yamuna encountered was that “a ball is not just a ball and that many balls could not hold people’s body weight.” The more she taught the public, the more she realized that she needed to create specific balls for specific purposes with differences in sizes, weight, and densities. Yamuna wrote two books about Yamuna® Body Rolling, but they did not get great exposure at the time because people misunderstood what she meant by balls and thought of the big balls used in gyms for stability and stretching.

Now Yamuna sells her own specialized balls and her work has grown very organically and through word of mouth. She continuously creates new work, always with the concept of providing education and products that will work and help people to self-heal, maintain, and prevent. Yamuna® Body Rolling is now in 24 countries and growing. She has over 2,000 certified practitioners worldwide. She and a team of strong and well-trained certifying instructors offer their certification courses worldwide. The world flagship Yamuna® studio is based in New York City’s Greenwich Village on Perry Street. All the Yamuna® work can be experienced there and is a destination spot for many people around the world.

Since Yamuna is dedicated to helping people successfully problem-solve and self-heal, she focuses on the parts of the body that commonly causes people the most problems. She has created the Yamuna® Save Your Body Part Series that offers simple anatomy and ways to problem solve in the most common problematic areas.

She also has another big work she is dedicated to…the feet! The Yamuna® Foot Fitness work is probably her most well-known product, helping thousands of people worldwide. The Yamuna® Foot Fitness certification trainings are also taught worldwide as a part of her effort to provide more certified practitioners to help with all the unnecessary foot problems that people are suffering from.

Foot Fitness Video with Yamuna

Presently, Yamuna is working on creating more education to help people overcome foot problems, and she is working on a new work called In Bed with Yamuna®, which is sure to raise a good deal of questions about the present information we are given about what we need to do to stay in good shape.

“With every decade of my life I learn more about what changes I need to make to keep myself full of energy, with free and unrestricted movement, says Yamuna. “I am dedicated to helping people be as good as they can be at every age! At 58 years old, I feel I am probably in the best shape of my life. I am committed to helping people get better and better with each decade. The body does not have to hold us back!”

Yamuna’s advice

Yamuna’s advice to anyone trying to start a business is to “Keep doing what you love. Stay focused on what you believe in. Keep the vision and when you accomplish one piece of your work, the next piece will show itself. When you are doing what you love, the financial benefit will come.”

Yamuna is taking her own advice and focusing on growing her business into a household brand that is used by spas, schools and rehab centers. She is looking to hire more staff to help with education and product development.

The Future

When asked about the future of YAMUNA ®, Yamuna always says that she “wants it to be in every household like aspirin! I want people to know how easy it is to problem solve in their own bodies and feel so much better on their own.

“With each decade of my life, I look for what the body needs to feel as good as it can. I look forward to the next decades of my life to keep bringing people ways to look and feel better at every age.”

Enter to Win a Silver Beginner Kit

You can enter to win a Silver Beginner Kit by leaving a comment below or on our Facebook Page by November 14th, 2012. The contest is open to people in Canada and the US.

The Silver Beginner Kit comes with a silver ball, a pump for inflating and deflating the balls, and the Total Body Rolling DVD. This kit is highly recommended as the place to start. It covers the hamstrings, each side of the spine up into the neck, and scull, and covers the abdominal area, chest, and shoulders from the front.

This gives you a good foundation in YBR and is a great general workout for keeping the body well aligned, toned, flexible, and with high quality range of motion.

This looks great. Is it strenuous? How about doing this if you have really bad knees and can’t kneel. Very curious about this. Would love to win the prize.

Yamuna Zake

This is perfect for rebuilding all the body parts in a gentle way. It helps you to reorganize and align all your body parts.

Jan

I have just recently learned about body rolling, and have bought the two books. I’m excited, and would love to win the prize as well. : ) Even if I don’t, I feel that I have already won in learning this wonderful technique! Thank you Yamuna.

http://www.facebook.com/deb.dianne Deb Dianne

Thank you for a more complete picture of how Yamuna and her practice began. Body rolling seems an odd term but I am familiar with pressure point therapy to relieve pain. I use a stability ball which feels wonderful on my back to relieve pain, so it follows the more firm ball would work as well. Thanks for a chance to win a beginning Yamuna set.

Sheila

I accidentally came across yoga ball massage in a yoga class with Jenny Anderson in Ottawa, Canada. It was the first time the pain between my shoulder blades was released and I surprisingly cried out in joy! I couldn’t believe that a little ball could do that – I had been to chiropractors and RMT with no success. My yoga teacher directed me to Yamuna for more practice … I am very eager to keep this practice up! Thank you for your wonderful article and spreading the word about body rolling! Warmly, Sheila

http://laterbloomer.com/ Debra Eve

What an intriguing concept! I’ve got a few aches and pains that just won’t go away. This is definitely something I’m going to check further into.

http://www.facebook.com/karen.skogstad.9 Karen Skogstad

This looks really interesting. Just getting over a sore back and am looking for ways to improve strength.

macdonx2

I have limited mobility and would love to try this to get stronger

Irish Eyes

I have never heard of this before, and it intrigues me! I would love to learn more about it. I anxiously await any new articles. Of course I would love to to win the Yamuna Silver Beginner Kit. Thanks for the opportunity!

http://www.facebook.com/miztlee Tammie Lee

This sounds amazing. I love yoga and i have enjoyed work outs on the large balls. But i had never heard of Yamuna. Thank you for the chance of winning.